Smoker's Tale in Harrowgate - a Philly Tale - 1957

I hate to rat out Sam some sixty odd years later about his not carding me buying a pack of cigarettes back in 1957 at his corner grocery store. 

I was something like 4 or 5 at the time and buying my dad his Lucky Strikes at that corner grocery store. 

A friend interested in the history of the old neighborhood sparked a memory and a story I often tell of being 4 or 5 and buying cigarettes and not being carded etc. (within a modern context of perhaps over regulation about everything in every day life.)

The pack of cigarettes back then cost 26 cents. A case quarter and a penny is the loot I usually carried in hand to fulfill the request of dad to get his daily fix of nicotine and to share with him my daily fix of second hand smoke with him if I remained indoors as he practiced his life long habit. 

Dad said that he wanted to quit his "dirty habit" (not an "addiction") with rumors of a state tax increase of one cent to 27 cents which came to pass. And of course dad did not quit. 

And to put this all in perspective. Sam knew that I did not smoke. And knew that I was being a "good boy" and messenger-ing a pack of smokes home to dad. 

And looking back I can see where Sam who lost relatives to the Holocaust in Europe in WWII and lived through Prohibition and the great Depression probably had his own spin on man made laws as a small businessman and yet I have to wonder what the law on the books truly was back then if any to selling to minors. But he was not selling to me. He was selling to my father. 

That Philly was not only a so called "city of homes" with its mega landscape of row houses with white marble stoops, that the future framework of housing for factory workers in a factory town like Harrowgate within Philadelphia County, was a future framework on a small scale of the "American Dream" of owning one's own home or being able to afford a mortgage on that home becaming a norm after WWII.

That Philly back them was more than a "city of homes", it was a city of neighborhoods, and of neighbors, like the corner grocer Sam who knew his neighbors and knew who and what he sold to those he knew as his neighbors.